The Witness and Alberto Mieglo

 One of my favorite shows streaming on Netflix right now is called "Love Death and Robots" 

The show, which was originally meant to be a remake of the 1981 anthology film "Heavy Metal", is an adult anthology show consisting of several animated shorts spread across each season. Each short ranges in style and tone but the overall theme of all of the shorts goes back to the title. 

I remember watching the first season of the show back when it premiered in 2019. While I loved majority of the shorts, one of them that really stood out to me, visually at least, was the third short of season one: "The Witness". 

"The Witness" is a thriller following a woman who witnesses a murder and is spotted by the killer. She is then pursued through the streets of Tokyo as she attempts to escape the killer. 

Once separates this short from the others in that season is the distinctive style. The art style is done completely in CG and looks very much like something out of a comic book. 

The character designs are heavily stylized and have a graffti-esque look to them...

But the actual animation of the characters is more realistic in how they move..... 

.....But not without having some manga-esque imagery thrown in

Even the buildings, while they are also stylized and CG, are crafted in a way to where they look realistic. As if they filmed live action shots of actual settings and then animated over them with the CG. 

The short is an absolute gorgeous to look at and it's definitely the most visually impressive short of the first season. 

If you were to look at the art style that short and think "Hey, this reminds me of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" then it's because the director of this short is artist Alberto Mieglo, who was a key artist during Spider-Verse's development and whose art was a big inspiration for the project. 

Mieglo is a master of his own craft with this distinctive style and it really shows in"The Witness" what he's capable and what he can do with CG visually. How the characters move, his use of camera, dynamic shots and color all come together in this short. It feels like a taste of what he would've done had he'd been the director of Spider-Verse instead of someone who helped on early development of it. 

it's just an overall great short all around that stands out visually amongst a sea of other good to great ones that are more on the "generic" side when it comes to their CG.